KAPOW!
It was a super-secret project that was developed and researched in San Antonio and South Texas during World War II. And as I discovered, it's still a big mystery today even to some top San Antonio historians.
I stumbled onto this story of one of the strangest episodes in San Antonio and even U.S. military history after a bat-slap.
Remember when Manu Ginobili made every highlight reel in the world last year when he swatted a wayward bat out of mid-air?
The little bat had delayed the game for several minutes swooping around the players at the AT&T Center until Manu stunned it with a quick left, picked it up, and walked it off the court .
That one weird little incident got me thinking and remembering how bats have played a surprisingly important role in San Antonio history. Then I started doing a little research in my own bat-time.
But I had no idea where that little bat-slap would lead me.
TO THE BAT CAVE!
The smell of guano is overhwhelming. Standing at the mouth of the Bracken Bat Cave north of San Antonio, it's not so much a smell but a vice grip that reaches up your nose and into your head. Your nose twitches and your eyes start to water.
Fran Hutchins helps out as a caretaker of the privately-owned cave. He tells me 40 to 50 tons of bat poop -- that's guano -- have been harvested out of the cave since the mid 1850's. And Hutchins, I see, has come prepared. He and a friend have shown up with white bio-suits and masks because they're going deep into the cave after our interview to check on poop levels and such.
I had planned only for an interview, not a poop-check, so I don't have a bat-mask. Our interview doesn't last terribly long once we reach the edge of the stench.
But Hutchins is one of the few people I found around San Antonio who knew anything about the bat-bomb project. Those I talked with at some of our military and research facilities in town as well as historians who I expected would know all about it -- didn't. Or they knew only a little.
Maybe it was that guano smell. Or the fact that the whole thing was so unbelievably weird -- and ultimately never used.
ON THE ROAD TO THE BAT BOMB
I did know something about our batty history and what bats have meant here. After shooting and reporting on n all kinds of stories here for more than 25 years, I love the history of San Antonio, especially the odd stuff.
I had heard, for example, that the old courthouse/city hall that stood on Municipal Plaza in the mid-1800's was called "The Bat Cave" because it was infested with so many bats. I knew that bat caves here provide tons of valuable guano that's used as high-grade fertilizer that's rich with nitrates.
And I also knew that Bracken Cave is home to the biggest single bat colony in the world with millions of Mexican Free-Tailed Bats roosting there.
And they have millions more bat-buddies hanging out in caves, nooks, crannies, under bridges and kinds of places all over the Hill Country and South Texas from spring to autumn, when they fly down to Mexico for the winter.
They're most impressive just before dusk when they swirl out of caves like Bracken like an immense swarm of bees. Hutchins describes it as a tornado blasting out of the mouth of the cave. A tornado that keeps going for several hours until all those millions of bats are out feasting on insects like mosquitoes.
And I remembered stories I shot just last year when the new stretch of the San Antonio River Walk opened and the discovery of a bat-roost above the river and under the I-35 bridge turned the whole thing into even more of a tourist attraction.
SERIOUSLY?
But the stuff about our bats playing a role in two wars and even the quest for a Nobel Prize? That I don't remember hearing about.
You see as it turns out, guano isn't just a great fertilizer. It can also be leached into saltpeter which is used to make gunpowder. And during the Civil War the Confederate Forces here used our caves to mine tons of guano to help manufacture ammunition. Caves were even guarded as there were plenty of Union sympathizers in Texas, though it was officially a part of the Confederacy. You could say bat poop -- at that time -- was the stuff of bullets, not bombs, though that would change.
But first it was back to fertilizing. After the Civil War, guano mining resumed for peaceful ends. Hill Country bat cave droppings helped green up lawns, gardens and crops for the growing population across the Southwest. As they still do.
NOBEL BATS
Then in the early 1900's the Texas Legislature nominated a top San Antonio doctor for the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his bat-work. Dr. Charles Campbell wanted to bring even more bats to the area and create colonies of them -- not for more guano, but to get rid of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
He experimented with various designs for man-made bat-roosts, finally hitting on a design that worked. They look like a cross between the base of a Dutch windmill and a church spire, but they did their job.
Mitchell Lake on San Antonio's south side was where the city dumped its raw sewage at the time. It's also where clouds of mosquitoes added to the nasty, swamp-like environment, reportedly creating a health hazard.
Dr. Campbell's big bat-house at Mitchell Lake is said to have drawn thousands of bats. Within a few years, the bat-population at this fake bat-cave was big enough to drop more than two tons of guano. More fertilizer. Fewer mosquitoes.
It's debatable whether the bat-roosts and their colonies helped cut the malaria problem, but those Dr. Campbell-inspired bat-roosts stood tall as landmarks across the area for decades, until a bat rabies scare brought most of them down.
The good doctor, by the way, did not win the Nobel Prize, a few photographs the only remaining evidence of his bat-houses, except for one that still stands today near the town of Comfort.
STRAP THEM ON! HE'S NOT A NUT.
Then came Pearl Harbor and World War II and a dental surgeon from Pennsylvania came up with the wholly bizarre idea to drop bomblets attached to bats toward Japanese targets. The bats would fly their little incendiary payloads right into the nooks and crannies of buildings and under eaves and bridges where they would start fires that would lead to bigger fires. And lots of destruction. At least that was the basic idea.
And the President himself OK'd the work on it. The dentist, Lytle S. Adams, had invented an early version of an Air-Mail system that was actually used for a few years in rural areas of the northeast. And he just happened to know the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. So he somehow got President Franklin D. Roosevelt to take a look at his idea and Roosevelt sent it on to an aide for further review, noting "This man is not a nut."
From there it would be researched by the Army, then the Navy and the Marines, beginning with Doc Adams and a team of bat-men coming to Texas and New Mexico to look for the most suitable bats. They decided our Mexican Free Tailed bats would make the perfect bat-bombers partly because of their size and design and partly because there were millions of them so easily available.
At the bat cave, Hutchins tells me they're the "high-flyers of the bat world, with narrow wings" and a strong enough body to carry the little payload. And that payload was designed by a top scientist. Louis Fieser, the inventor of napalm, came up with a working bomb which was small enough for bats to carry, yet strong enough to start wood planks on fire.
Nobody who lived near the bat caves knew that there was a major bomb project in the works while it was going on. And that's another reason it's such a mystery today.
After all it was top secret and at times troops were actually guarding the caves as if someone might steal the bats. They had enclosures built to put over the mouths of the Bracken and other caves, including Ney's Cave near Bandera and Frio Cave near Uvalde. The bat-bomb team also did some work at what was then the Hondo Army Air Field.
Another reason they chose these bats was that they're "chill-able." They can be cooled into a kind of temporary hibernation when they could be handled more easily while they were being were shipped around and having bombs clipped to their chests. But bats are a little hard to aim.
WHOOPS!
The whole project was nearly killed when some armed and ready bats got loose and off-target and their little bombs wound up destroying part of a military airstrip in New Mexico. An officer's car was another victim.
But Doc Adams came up with a pretty ingenious design for the bombs and the whole bat-dropping procedure. His plans called for each bomb-shaped metal container to hold a thousand bomb-strapped bats. They would still be semi-conscious when fleets of B-25's would drop them from a mile above Japanese industrial targets.
On each of those containers, the parachute would quickly open and the outside of the cylinder would fall away. That allowed the two dozen or so layers of bat crates to drop accordion-like toward the ground.
The crates were still strung together as they drifted down, letting the bats fall onto the top of the crate below and have time to wake up before they flew off. When they did, a string or wire attached to each would be pulled and act as a primer.
The bat-bombers would now be committed.
AND IT WORKED?
There aren't many accounts of Project X-Ray that are very detailed and some are conflicting, but the strangest thing about this bat-bomb idea is that it looks like it worked. Or would have worked.
At least at a 1943 test at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the bat bombs destroyed some buildings in a mock-Japanese target.
So what happened to the idea?
BOOM GOES THE BAT-BOMB!
It was scrapped sometime after that last test, apparently because it was taking too long to develop and because of another more promising bomb project. While the bat-bomb wasn't projected to be field-ready until mid-1945, the Atom Bomb was closer to completion.
The Manhattan Project beat Project X-Ray. And our little would-be warriors lived to fly another day and go back... to the bat cave!
If you know more about Project X-Ray or other (verifiable) oddities of San Antonio history, I would like to hear from you at randybeamer@woaitv.com. I'll also pass on what I can to historians at the military bases and libraries here who were a little stumped on this one.
Thanks to Fran Hutchins and the people with Bracken Cave, Bat Conservation International, the Texas Cave Management Association, and Bexar Grotto.
And to News 4 WOAI Photographer-Editor Chris Graczyk and Graphic Artist Abe Exxum for going all-out on this one. Great work.
